A group of senior former politicians and diplomats have said Donald Trump should press Israel to release the Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison, as an important step towards reviving a lasting two-state solution, after a board meeting in London on Tuesday.
The Elders group, set up by Nelson Mandela in 2007, is chaired by Juan Manuel Santos, the former Colombian president and Nobel peace laureate. Its members include the former Irish president Mary Robinson, the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, and Graça Machel, the former Mozambique minister and freedom fighter.
The group also condemned the latest Israeli attacks on Gaza City as “a flagrant violation of the ceasefire deal”. In a statement, they proposed much more pressure be applied on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, warning the humanitarian situation remained catastrophic.
The call for Barghouti’s release, at one point tentatively supported by Trump, is widely supported by European countries as they seek a way to revive divided Palestinian politics and ensure the current vacuum is not filled by Hamas. All sides have agreed that Hamas cannot play a role in the future of governance, including the Hamas leadership. But the release of Barghouti, a long-term advocate for a two-state solution by peaceful means, is seen as a way to stop a reversal in the Hamas approach to its future political role.
Barghouti is consistently the most popular Palestinian leader in opinion polls.
The Elders in their statement “condemn the ill-treatment, including torture, of Barghouti and other Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are arbitrarily detained. Israeli authorities must abide by their responsibilities under international law to protect prisoners’ human rights”.
They added: “Only the Palestinian people have the right to choose their own leadership. We welcome the commitment by president Mahmoud Abbas to hold free and fair elections under international auspices within the next 12 months to rejuvenate Palestinian governance.”
The statement referenced the fact that many Palestinians refer to Barghouti as “their Mandela”.
“He has a vital role to play as a unifying figure, whose reputation as a supporter of a two-state solution has grown over his 23 years of imprisonment. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the founding chair of the Elders, first called for his release in 2013.”
The group pointed out that Barghouti’s release is supported by many Israeli political and security figures, including a former director of the Shin Bet internal security agency.
Barghouti was convicted in a trial in 2004 after the second intifada, when Israel accused him – then head of Fatah in the West Bank – of being the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the unofficial collection of Fatah-linked armed groups that carried out attacks on Israelis.
He has never commented on his links to the Brigades. While he has expressed that his objective is a Palestinian state existing side-by-side in peace with Israel, he has said Palestinians have a right to fight back in the face of growing Israeli settlements and the military’s violence against Palestinians. He was given five life sentences but never defended himself in court, saying he did not recognise the authority of the court.
